The city of Chicago has gotten a $51,840 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to help clean up emissions from their garbage trucks. Thirteen heavy duty garbage trucks will get equipped with diesel-fired engine coolant and hydraulic system heaters that will presumably allow the engines to be shutdown when stopped, reducing idle time. This project is part of an ongoing initiative by Chicago to upgrade existing diesel vehicles to clean up emissions. The city has already retrofitted a numb

Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that the EPA had jurisdiction to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the agency began formulating regulations. By December of 2007, they had a proposal ready to go that would have effectively mandated a 35mpg standard by 2018. That would have put it two years ahead of what was ultimately passed in the energy bill. In January of this year EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told a Senate committee that the agency would release CO2 standards by M

When the new energy bill was signed into law by the president in December, it included requirements for increased use of biofuels as part of the package. The Environmental Protection Agency has just updated the 2008 renewable fuels standard for the second time since November. Prior to the energy bill, the law mandated 5.4 billion gallons of renewable fuels had to be blended into the gasoline sold in the United States in 2008. That amount has now been bumped up to 9 billion gallons or an average

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson today announced the agency was rejecting California's application for a waiver that would allow the state to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. California and seventeen other states had wanted to impose rules that would limit CO2 emissions. The rules would have effectively raised fuel efficiency requirements since CO2 emissions are directly related to fuel burned.

The state of California has been waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to rule on an application for a waiver for its greenhouse gas emissions rules since late 2005. The EPA has stated that they plan to rule by the end of 2007, but for some reason California doesn't want to wait any longer. The state has said that if the EPA doesn't rule by Oct. 24 they will sue.

The Environmental Protection Agency has long been reluctant to limit greenhouse gas emissions and until the Supreme Court ruled that they had the authority to do so they made no moves in that direction. The state of California has been trying to implement their own greenhouse gas emissions limits but they need a waiver from the federal EPA to do so. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he would sue the federal agency if they did not rule on the issue by October 22, but EPA Administrato